​I approached our match against the Blues with a familiar melancholy. The Dogs, 15th on the ladder, were playing for not much at all, against a team on the very  bottom of the ladder, one that has recently been pretty much a rabble.

I've been here so very, very, very, many times before.

It wasn't enticing. I surely, surely, had better things to do.

It wasn't even because I dreaded the prospect that we could lose to the Blues as we memorably did a few short weeks ago. 'Dreaded'  was too strong a word, implying anxiety, fear, investment, hope. I would have dreaded it, if we were a top side, playing for a finals spot, and losing to a bottom team would have been a major, genuine embarrassment.

No, as has happened rather frequently in my barracking career, I approached the probable loss with stoicism rather than terror. Because the Dogs, I've been realising, probably much more belatedly than I should have, are in the Footy Twilight Zone.

Our spot in the bottom reaches of the ladder is no longer completely mystifying, or an aberration, or constantly being defined against our premiership heroics. It's just where, presently, in mid-season 2019, we belong.

We are not especially woeful... I've got too much valuable perspective over the years about what 'woeful' looks like, and this isn't close. 

Our team is just at present one of those shapeless hybrids, from which I can't yet get a read. Veterans nearing the end, but kids at varying stages - including the ominous 'I'm not that sure any more he's going to make it' stage. Some are languishing at Footscray; they have too much talent to stay there forever. Some have been promoted, but the reasons they languished are painfully obvious. Some have been promoted, and we don't have the foggiest idea why. There are our enigmatic - and dwindling - band of premiership heroes, from whom a ferocious drive to be the best again is not always apparent. That sense of a coherent story, of where our club is headed - whether to deeper pain and the dreaded 'bottoming out', or with just a smidgin of luck back into contention, soon-ish - is yet to emerge.

And so I'd watched our matches against the Cats, and then the Eagles, with a growing sense of apathy. We never REALLY looked like winning, and to that I was becoming sadly resigned.

I guess I'm well and truly in a mid-season slump.

It was when I switched off the TV before the end, as the Dogs were predictably overrun by the Eagles, and the memory of our most gallant and stirring finals victory over there receded that bit further into the distance, that I put a name to my condition. I was out of love with football, and out of love, right now and in these moments, with my club.

I didn't care very much, any more, as we racked up the losses. I was stoical, not incensed, as the Cats slammed on goals in their ritual, annual pounding of our team. I shrugged my shoulders, as Eagles' forwards monstered us, and our competitive start came to naught.

I couldn't join the lynch mob baying for blood. It was easier to just shut out the questions. But it also meant shutting off my emotions, so I didn't have to dig too deep to wonder what's going wrong.

I was sombre, but no longer distressed or surprised, as I read comments from our premiership ruckman Jordan Roughead (now quite handily holding down a defensive role at the second-on-the-ladder Magpies) about his last, unenjoyable season with us. He said that he wouldn't have continued to play this season if he couldn't transfer away from the Dogs, such was his disaffection. About the club he'd supported all his life. The club where he'd been part of a fairytale flag.

I listened, but with a certain indifference, to the clamour about what 'appropriate' barracking is all about, or ridiculous debates about whether it is okay for two Indigenous guys to share a laugh on the footy field.

I was trying not to think any more what the disturbing questions raised by theTom Boyd departure, even as news broke that the terribly luckless Lin Jong is taking time out to deal with his own mental health struggle.

I knew, because I am a grizzled veteran of the Royce Hart era, the Peter Rhode era, and all the miserable tail-ends of 'nearly there' eras, that there is only one tried and true cure for my condition.

Somehow, you keep going, dragging out the scarf and hauling yourself out to days and nights like these. Like the marathon runner who no longer remembers why she or he is competing, you put one foot in front of the other. You know, rather than feel, that this too will pass. You simply have to ride it out, until a spark of joy ignites, and the romance of footy returns.

With this quintessentially Tragician-like mindset I was disconcerted by our reasonably productive first half against the Ole Dark Bourgeois  Blues. So deeply had I barricaded myself into my grim survival mode fortress that I was puzzled when we - how often does this happen these days? - got the first goal, and the one after that.

I got a little perky, my head raised from its protective slump, when Tim The Pom English, kept tapping the ball into the grateful arms of The Bont, who looked like he'd ingested some 'Patrick Cripps Who?' angry pills. 

Goals were being scored without the usual 2019 laborious effort. Libba was protecting the Bont at stoppages and yapping at the Blues' heels like a Chihuahua, bringing on one of footy's guilty pleasures, the defiant satisfaction of having an unsociable player that you would loathe if he played for your opponents. Patrick 'Monica' Lipinski was having a wonderful match. Josh Dunkley hacked a goal out of a ruck contest and just kept getting the ball. JJ went for some runs. Yes, the Dogs were doing it all pretty comfortably. I wasn't leaping out of my seat, but I was pleased enough. Maybe this 'just-get-on-with-it-and-turn-up' approach of mine was paying dividends, as well as increasing my sense of virtuous superiority over less committed supporters, when the Dogs - and this too I know - come back into contention again.

There had to be a twist of the knife, of course. We had to play a lacklustre third quarter, so that the Ole Dark Navy Blue-baggers could stage a revival. But we staunched the bleeding. It was wise not to think too hard and too long about whether that was really because the Blues are not very good, rather than that our team were all that imposing.

In the first half of the last quarter, having survived the near-death experience,  the young guns contributed to our comeback. A beautiful goal slotted by a nerveless Bailey Smith. A brave mark by The Pom. Hard running from Lipinksi. There were steadying efforts by the old hands. 

With the match apparently lost, the Blues' supporters filed from the stadium, with the resigned and humble look that only years of failure help you to cultivate. (Ask the Tragician for tips). 

I was relieved rather than euphoric. None of us would be rushing home to watch every sparkling moment, or even to re-live the howlers, but we'd built a six-goal lead with 10 minutes to go. Against one of the competition's worst ever performed teams, this lead was, surely, insurmountable.

That lead proceeded to be surmounted. (If that's not a word it should be).

I wasn't sure whether I was numb, or in pain, as the Blues stormed forward again and again, while we made dumb errors, again and again.

Maybe I wasn't really numb, because I whispered to Libba Sister Two that I had NEVER had a worse feeling at a footy game.

Objectively, given the reality of what I have experienced in my barracking life, this was a completely ridiculous statement.

But it felt true, in those agonising moments when the Dogs conspired to do everything possible to lose the game. It really felt true.

And even though I'd gone to the game in full expectation that we could lose... there is losing. And there is losing... like that.

I felt like I was glimpsing the final, emphatic, definitive exclamation point, that the era that began with the joyous, romping, fear-nothing Men of Mayhem in 2015 was over.

Didn't Our Boys have the hunger, still? Had they forgotten how to win? Would they feel the squandering of a five-goal lead against the bottom-of-the-ladder Blues, in the same way as us...the same humiliation and despair that we would irrationally and unreasonably feel if we lost - the flip side to the irrational and unreasonable pride we feel when they win?

Josh Dunkley won a free. I guess the stadium was... holding its breath. The siren finally, mercifully, sounded.

We'd been spared the bitterness of defeat. But it didn't feel like the sweetness of victory.

Somehow, even though we'd won, even though our song rang out, I wanted very much to cry. Because, whether we'd somehow, as we did, ended up with our noses in front, or as we so very nearly did, tasted ignominious defeat, that exclamation point was still there in my vision. I couldn't un-see it any more.

The Bulldogs faithful left the stadium. There was no hubris towards the relatively few Blues' fans who'd stayed to watch their improbable and yet oh so probable comeback. Nobody was prepared to gloat about our victory over our former arch-enemy. There weren't even those little chuckles as we exchanged glances with our fellow Bulldogs' supporters, the relieved 'we dodged a bullet there!' smiles.

The next day, perspective will return; we can see what we did right for so much of the night, be more realistic and logical about the impact on the match of the loss of Libba, remind ourselves that our team that night was younger than Carlton's. The resilient among us will say about our present 2019 predicament (and it will be true): This too will pass.

But right now, as we filed out of the arena in near-silence, it felt like one of footy's most singular experiences, the Win That Feels Like A Loss.

​While Our Boys took on Freo many kilometres away, exasperated text messages flew thick and fast between Tragician family members, all stranded helplessly on our respective couches at home.

Our blokes were trying so hard, battling away in hostile territory, for so little reward. As the missed opportunities piled up, so too did the level of angst, sprinkled with black humour, at the predictability of the wayward kicking for goal.

By the last quarter, we cringed rather than celebrated whenever we got inside 50 metres.

The poo emoji soon became an effective shortcut to convey our emotions. (It certainly would have been handy for most of the Tragician’s barracking career).

Yet as the final siren sounded, I made one of my bolder, indeed outlandish statements, confidently tipping a win against the Tigers. 

Considering we’d just registered our fourth painful loss in a row I’m still not sure where this conviction came from. In the wake of the loss the gloom and doom around our club had reached epidemic and slightly hysterical proportions.

Among the Bulldog faithful, the mood was agitated. Skill development had gone backwards, fans lamented; premiership stars’ form had stagnated. The kids weren’t coming along as we’d hoped!

Selections were baffling. That’s been so ever since Bevo Our Saviour arrived, of course, but now there was open discussion on a previously unthinkable topic: ‘Was Bevo’s time up?’ (Nobody, I regret to report, was calling him Our Saviour either).

In support of this hideous question, a narrative, beloved of the outside world but previously angrily resisted by our own fans, took hold: The achievement of the premiership had been some kind of fluke, where an ordinary bunch of players and coaching staff got lucky, combining to pull off a daring heist on the competition, before slinking back into our usual well-deserved mediocrity.

I was astonished, not so much by the negativity, but by how familiar the tone of the commentary was. The Bontempelli ‘why not us?’ question had in the blink of an eye reverted to ‘why us?’

That undercurrent of thinking – that there’s something quintessentially wrong with our club – had somehow, like a plague of cockroaches, withstood the premiership win; mysteriously, it had re-emerged, reinforced, indeed confirmed, by the speed with which the Battling Bulldogs had reverted to type.

How come only our club could go spectacularly backwards, after a flag won by one of the youngest groups ever? Why hadn’t that day in 2016 liberated us, forever, from our dismal past, as it had with the Geelong and Richmond clubs, who once they got the sniff of success, chased it even more hungrily? 

It wasn’t just that the questions were posed that startled me. It was that the same old bitterness, honed through decades of failure, still existed underneath them. I detected panic that our golden memory of 2016 was becoming another cruel joke at our expense, a bit like a child being informed that Santa wasn’t real.  

Against this backdrop, my announcement that the Bulldogs would triumph was more than a little eccentric, especially coming from one who was just as strongly convinced (with good reason as it sadly turned out) that we’d lose to Carlton.

Yet apart from that abomination, which fortunately I’d avoided, I didn’t feel our team was actually playing badly. (A bit like Greg Chappell when he defended those seven ducks in a row by saying he wasn’t in the crease long enough to actually be playing poorly). I still saw spirit and heart and self-belief.

We just weren’t ... kicking goals, which is kind of an essential part of the game, I’ll admit.

The first quarter of the clash against Richmond contained moments that initially boded well for my reckless prediction. We won the ball, time and again. The Bont started in majestic form, as he wrested the ball from packs and then loped in his characteristic way into our forward line, calmly slotting a difficult goal.  Whatever today’s outcome, I decided, I could sit back and revel in a peerless display from our Artist-in-residence.

But his team-mates were not able to emulate his effort. Again, the missed shots accumulated. You could see the mental struggle in which our players were stuck, like quicksand, dreading to be the one who would be next to create that moaning sigh of disappointment from our crowd (not to mention a barrage of poo emojis on social media).

My pre-game confidence wavered. Perhaps it was inevitable, the way the match would play out. The gallant Dogs would keep working tirelessly, fruitlessly; the ruthless, efficient Tigers would punish our turnovers, conjuring goals so much less painfully than us. The Tigers song would reverberate around the stadium, while I hastily deleted my ludicrous text message. Bevo would walk down from the coaching box, to sullen mutters among the restless crowd, wearing  the blank expression of the coach under siege. We would head home, resigned, angry, baffled and heartsore. I would wonder if those troubling questions about our club had the tiniest kernel of truth.

We needed something, somebody to change that story. We were waiting. We just didn’t know what  for.

Aaron Naughton entered the stage.

Suddenly every time he went near the ball, we hoped, and then came to expect, he would mark it. And..he'd then kick a goal! In an amazing blitz, he was electrifying, exhilarating, spectacular.

The degree of difficulty only spurred him on.

‘A crowded pack of players? I guess I’ll just have to jump over the top of you all.’

We once saw another teenager inspire us with his gift for marking, but Chris Grant, memorably described by Martin Flanagan as ‘the boy with the solemn hands’ marked in a different way. Smoothly, elegantly, the ball glided into his mitts. I can't find the words for what Aaron Naughton is doing out there. Players ‘drag down’ a mark’, or ‘grab’ the ball, or 'clunk' it or 'catch' it; but they are phrases too humdrum to describe what we were watching, with increasing awe. I find myself reaching for another sport for an analogy, for with his exquisite timing and feel for the ball, he resembled a surfer, catching the surge of the perfect wave.

Maybe it was even simpler: he was just playing park footy, a kid revelling in taking speckies over his mates.

The crowd mood shifted. Buoyant, excited, appreciative, spellbound. We wanted more.

Aaron Naughton (and the Herald Sun hit perfect pitch when they dubbed him the Astro-Naught) was only too happy to deliver. He was even having such a good time, that he gave a little wink after another brilliant mark. It could have been lair-like, but I don’t think (unlike ‘Somebody Else of a Lairy Disposition’ we could mention), it was about himself. It wasn’t cocky, or arrogant. It was more like what I've dubbed 'the Bontempelli smirk'.

‘How good, and simple, and fun is footy. 

By the time we woke from the spell that he’d cast, we were six, seven goals up from the Tiges. The Tragician was looking smug and searching for a screenshot of that text message to show all and sundry she was a sage, an oracle, a soothsayer.

In between my attempts to somehow claim credit for the win, I thought about Luke Beveridge. Saturday night was his 100th game; Bob wrote a tribute trying to capture his enigmatic coach. He said that when he arrived at our despondent club in 2014, its players riven with doubt and haunted by failure, Bevo (who will forever be Our Saviour) began asking them: ‘How good could you be?’ 

I think of Aaron Naughton, who didn't manage even one contested mark against Freo, throwing himself carelessly, joyfully, towards the ball, and wonder if his coach’s words ring in his ear.

So much of my thinking, and I'm not alone, since 2016 has been about the premiership group. Would THEY re-discover the hunger? How had THEY coped with climbing the summit? When would THEY do it for us, again? Yet just as the fearless boys of 2016 didn’t care a jot about what had gone before, that flag is ancient history for the newbies whose hunger is raw. Tim English, Bailey Smith, Ed Richards - you can feel sure they're going to create their own story. I guess I'll need to strap myself in for another rollercoaster ride.

When Our Boys sang the song, Aaron Naughton, who won’t turn 20 until the end of the 2019 season, was the most exuberant of the exuberant. I couldn’t help but laugh; it was like his singing, and accompanying half-jig, echoed the carefree way he'd approached the ball.

I heard a journalist on the radio the next day, talking about an interview with "The Astro-Naught" at the start of the season.

‘Nothing fazes him,’ he said. ‘He's an uncomplicated guy. He just loves footy.

'But he did say one thing,' the journalist, too, began to laugh, remembering our number 33's amazing deeds: 'I  like to launch.’

Watch Aaron Naughton sing the song:
​https://www.westernbulldogs.com.au/video/2019-05-04/team-song-western-bulldogs